New Books in African Studies 4k1e56

When and where do African American religions begin? Sylvester Johnson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Religious Studies at Northwestern University, disrupts the traditional temporal and geographical boundaries in the academic study of black religion in the Americas…

In popular discourse today, few concepts are more sensationalized and maliciously caricatured than that of the Islamic State. In his fascinating new book For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2016), Noah Salomon…

In Healthcare Policy In Africa: Institutions and Politics from Colonialism to the Present (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Jean-Germain Gros argues that healthcare policy should be the black box rather than the black hole of African Studies. By this he…

Supermodel Georgie Badiel grew up in a small village in Burkina Faso where the closest source of water was many miles from home. After launching her successful modeling career, she began to speak out about the vital importance clean water…

In Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2015), Carina E. Ray interrogates the intersections of race, marriage, gender and empire in this thought-provoking study that challenges the notion of…

In The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jewish-Muslim relations from 1914 to the present. Arguing that interactions between Jews and Muslims must be understood in…

In A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham (W. W. Norton, 2016), freelance journalist Steve Kemper details the adventurous, wandering life of the man who later inspired the creation of the Boy Scouts. Tracking Burnham’s journeys from…

Michael F. Robinson‘s new book is such a pleasure to read, I cant even. It’s not just because you get to say Gambaragara over and over again if you read it aloud. (I recommend doing this, even if just…

Most scholars of popular music use songs, artists, and clubs as the key texts and sites in their exploration of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of music. Laurent Dubois‘ new book looks at the history of an…

Anthropologist Birgit Meyer‘s most recent book, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015), explores the dynamic process of popular video filmmaking in Ghana as a new medium for the imagination that interweaves technological,…

Allison Drew’s We Are No Longer in : Communists in Colonial Algeria (Manchester University Press, 2014) traces the long, complex history of communism in Algeria throughout the colonial period. Rethinking the “narratives of failure” that have hitherto dominated studies…

Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015) is a gorgeous book. It’s about light and the practices of self representation in diasporic and Caribbean communities. Krista A. Thompson looks carefully and sees…

Aisha DurhamView on AmazonIs hip hop defined by its artists or by its audience? In Home With Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture (Peter Lang, 2014) Aisha Durham returns hip hop scholarship to its roots by engaging in an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic approach to studying hip hop. Rooting her study in the Diggs Park Public Housing Project in Norfolk, Virginia, Durham examines what hip hop means to ordinary and everyday women who see themselves as hip hop, equals to the rappers and other artists who receive greater recognition and scholarly attention. By focusing on gender and social class, Durham explores the sexual scripts that women find and negotiate within hip hop and how hip hop continually navigates socio-economic boundaries. She also considers how the very act of studying and writing about hip hop can turn a hip hop "insider" into an outsider. The book spends considerable attention looking at Queen Latifah and Beyoncé as key figures who both reinforce and interrogate dominant representations of African American women. Aisha Durham is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research about Black popular culture explores the relationship between media representations and everyday life. She examines how controlling images or power-laden stereotypes are produced by media makers and interpreted by media audiences to make sense of blackness in the "post" era. She is co-editor of Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (2007) and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method, and Policy (2007).

Alice J. KangView on AmazonAlice J. Kang has written Bargaining for Women's Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Kang is assistant professor of political science and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Much attention is paid to Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East, especially the contentious role of women's rights in those countries. Less attention has been paid to Muslim democracies in Africa. Kang's book focuses on the politics of women's rights in one such country: Niger. Women's rights activists in Niger have fought to participate in democratic governance, but haven't won every recent battle. Kang highlights several successes as well as policy areas where women's organizations have failed to win policy victories. The book has much to say about social movements and also the evolving way Muslim majority democracies grapple with human rights.

Sarah Abrevaya SteinView on AmazonIn Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago, 2014), Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, takes a new perspective to the history of Algerian Jews, looking at the Saharan Jews to south of the larger, coastal communities.  Saharan Jews received different treatment from French authorities, asking us to rethink the story we tell about colonialism and decolonization and Jewish history. Stein draws on materials from thirty archives across six countries to shed light on this small, but revealing, community that has not received its due attention until now.

Marjorie FeldView on AmazonIn Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Marjorie Feld, associate professor of history at Babson College, explores the tension between the particularist and universalist commitments many American Jews have felt in the battle against apartheid.  For Feld, the post-war debates among American Jews about how to deal with injustice in South Africa later expanded when the term apartheid was used in other contexts. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Feld brings a global perspective to the story of the American Jewish past.

Kelly M. Duke BryantView on AmazonEducation as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s-1914 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) questions and complicates the two dominant narratives of African colonial education, namely that colonial education was a tool of indoctrination and that its establishment was resisted by chiefs and other traditional power brokers because of its perceived threat to their authority. Author Kelly M. Duke Bryant challenges these interrelated narratives by using archival sources – mainly correspondence – to demonstrate the nuanced reasons for both the early resistance to and the later acquiescence to, French colonial education. Duke Bryant looks at the evolution of schooling throughout Senegal during the early colonial period, and at the School of Sons of Chiefs and Interpreters in particular, and concludes that "colonial education reshaped local political processes and hierarchies in important ways". Education as Politics serves as a backdrop to the election of Blaise Diagne, the first African elected to the Assemblée Nationale (French National Assembly) in 1914, and in the interview, Duke Bryant outlines the ways in which new forces mobilized by colonial schooling set the stage for this momentous event.

View on AmazonIn 1951 a West-Indian seaman was killed in Cape Town by two white policemen. His murder had initiated protests and demonstrations in the Caribbean and in London. This, tells us Dr. Elizabeth M. Williams, was the beginning of the international Anti-apartheid movement. In The Politics of Race in Britain and South Africa: Black British Solidarity and the Anti-Apartheid Movement (I. B. Tauris, 2015), Williams marries two histories that are usually treated separately, the history of the British anti-apartheid movement (AAM) and the history of black activism in Britain to reveal a hidden history of black anti-apartheid activism in Britain. The book argues that black individuals rejected the AAM because it did not engage with domestic forms of racism and discrimination. The predominantly white constituency of the AAM as an organization, and its close ties to the African National Congress rather than the Pan Africanist Congress, added further discomfort. Williams ushers in evidence from a variety of published and unpublished documents from official state, organizational and newspaper archives. She enriches the narrative and her argument by weaving in oral interviews conducted with leading figures of the black anti-apartheid struggle in Britain and politicians involved with British foreign policy in South Africa. Elizabeth M. Williams is a historian of modern British history, Africa and the African diaspora. She is an academic Librarian and is based at Goldsmiths University of London.

Chike JeffersView on AmazonNgugi wa Thiong'o, who famously made the decision in the 1970s to henceforth only produce his creative work in his native Gikuyu, rather than in English, authors the foreword to Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2013), which he calls a "historic intervention in the debates about African philosophy." The collection offers a balanced representation, along an east-west axis, of the continent, with essays in Luo, Gikuyu, Amharic, Igbo, Akan (also known as Twi), and Wolof. The dual-language format allows readers to see the text (including Ethiopic script) as written by the authors, with the English translation on the facing page. In this engaging interview, Chike Jeffers, editor of Listening to Ourselves, describes the genesis of the anthology and the project's import for the expression and dissemination of African thought, going forward.

Gregory E. O’Malley examines a crucial, but almost universally overlooked, aspect of the African slave trade in his new book Final ages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2014).…